Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) is just on the other side of the hill. As the Appleverse waits for this year’s onslaught of announcements, maybe it’s time to re-examine one of last year’s more puzzling hardware moves.
When Apple put the new M1 processor in the 2021 iPad Pro (and later in 2022's iPad Air 5), its community of loyalists, fanboys/girls and social media hangers-on let out a collective gasp. The ground-breaking CPU had been introduced the year before in the 2020 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops, but putting the M1 in a tablet drew a near-universal “Why?”
And those who weren’t asking why started asking “When are they putting MacOS on the iPad?”
As the owner of both an M1 MacBook Air and, at the time, a 2018 iPad Pro, I too wondered, just for a moment, if this might be a good idea.
Then I remembered Windows 8.
A Tale Of Two Metaphors
An operating system (“OS,” for the acronymically inclined) defines how software and hardware work together. A user interface (or “UI”) defines how the user works with the software.
For most of us there are two kinds of user interface in the world, each of which provides the us with a metaphor for using the device. One is the desktop UI, found in desktop and laptop computers. It gives us the metaphor of the computer as an office, with documents, folders, file cabinets, a desk with a typewriter, clock, trash can, etc. Most of us knew how to use these physical objects back when desks actually held typewriters and file folders, and the aim of the desktop metaphor is to help us use the computer to perform these timeless tasks.
In the desktop metaphor, everything is controlled with a keyboard and a pointing device, such as a mouse. This UI was designed not only to look like a desk, but to be used at a desk with a keyboard, a mouse, and one or more sizable displays. (Laptops don’t break this metaphor; they just shrink it down into a unified package.)
The other UI is mobile, on devices with smaller screens, usually controlled by a finger or a couple of thumbs. The recent addition of external keyboard and mouse support is merely a convenience; the user can do very little with this additional hardware they can’t do without using fingers.
On mobile, applications occupy the full screen. There are fewer menus, and elements such as buttons are larger to aid in one-digit use. The keyboard is tiny and visible only when required, and there’s no need for a mouse.
Ideally the mobile UI is even better than the desktop UI at guiding the user, because they usually don’t have the time, patience and screen real estate to read documentation.
Until recently, Apple had two major OSs, or at least two UIs: MacOS (formerly OS X) for desktops and laptops, and iOS for phones and tablets. In 2019 Apple split the mobile OS into iOS and iPadOS, in part to allow software to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen.
The release of iPadOS was like dropping chum off the stern of a fishing boat: users smelled multiple windows, drag-and-drop copying, and the Files app in the water and drew them to the boat, hungry for an alternate to loud, heavy, battery-chewing laptops. Adding one of the most powerful CPUs available just sharpened that hunger and made the churning in the water more frantic.
But putting the M1 in a device running iPadOS seems like overkill, akin to mounting a jet engine on a Cessna. The M1 simply provides more power than iPadOS needs. So, people asked, why not port MacOS to the iPad?
Microsoft already tried it
Microsoft started playing with touch interfaces way back in 2002 with Windows XP, but their vision for mobile didn’t gel until the early 2010s. They were so enamored with the result that they dragged the UI, called Metro, into Windows 8. Along with it came the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which promised to allow developers to create apps compatible with both mobile and desktop Windows platforms.
While Metro might have made sense on phones (though not to enough sense to dent the Android and iOS co-dominance of the smartphone market), Windows 8 mixed the desktop and mobile UI metaphors and nearly broke them altogether.
It’s not that Microsoft didn’t try to make Windows work with a tablet UI. The Surface Pro, released with Windows 8 Pro, was a decent first entry in what became the “2-in-1” laptop market, and Windows 8 had been designed for tablets and was far more touch-friendly than earlier “tablet editions” of Windows. Microsoft was so convinced it had created a full Windows tablet that they didn’t even include the keyboard in the box. The Surface Pro really, really wanted to be a tablet.
Whatever the strengths of the Surface Pro, Windows 8 took the turn to mobile too hard and too fast. The Start button and menu were gone, replaced by Metro’s brightly-colored sea of live and static tiles stretching over multiple windows. Those were designed to be poked at with a finger, though a mouse was acceptable in a pinch.
With Windows 8, Microsoft seemed to be abandoning the desktop, offering a tablet UI trying to disguise a desktop OS. It was Oz, the Great and Terrible, a high-tech face on a perfectly acceptable steam engine, controlled by a man behind a curtain.
The sudden shift toward mobile was one of the reasons Windows 8 was so roundly hated. People don’t come to Windows for a mobile experience. For almost twenty years most people had used Windows at their desks, their computers (even Surface Pros) attached to monitors, keyboards and mice. The loss of the Start button drew howls of protest. It was as if Microsoft was trying to drag everyone into the mobile world, willing or not.
Though many of the sensible touch features introduced in Windows 8 live on in Windows 10 and 11, few developers adopted UWP — why bother, when Windows 8 ran their existing applications just fine, and the market for tablet PCs was so small? Application menus and controls, UI elements sometimes dating back to Windows NT, remained scaled to the desktop metaphor, often too small to use comfortably with a finger.
If Apple builds it, they will come
The lesson of Windows 8 is that you can’t slap a desktop OS onto a tablet and assume the developers and users will happily follow along.
Microsoft was at a disadvantage when Windows 8 came out in 2012. Though Windows was the market-leading OS, Microsoft was just introducing its own line of desktop/laptop hardware, and was far behind the mobile market with its partnership with Nokia.
For their part, Apple already built both families of hardware and controlled their operating systems as well, resulting in a strong, though much smaller, user and developer base. Then as now, this gave Apple the power to do what it wanted with them.
Users have spent years begging Apple to strengthen the iPad’s OS. They want professional-grade software, better file system access, and support for multi-tasking and a more flexible windowing UI. Apple has responded with better multitasking support, the Files app, and wider mouse and keyboard integration.
But these welcome improvements might not be as important to the future of the iPad as the stable of major developers (such as Adobe) that already make software designed for mobile devices. They are positioned to respond quickly to changes in the OS, whether revolutionary or evolutionary.
If Apple builds it, they will come.
Which Way Will The Apple Fall?
Will Apple start moving iPadOS closer to a desktop OS? Or will MacOS move toward touch? WWDC will give us some hints, but both approaches are perilous.
In the metaphorical sense, today’s MacOS is just like early versions of Windows XP, the ones before Microsoft added stylus features. There are no Macs with touch-sensitive displays, and MacOS has no provision for touch control. While Apple can take their hardware and operating systems in any direction they want, they still need to convince developers and users to come along with them.
Of course, Apple has changed the course of their platform before. In 1994 they replaced the 68000 series of CPUs with the PowerPC, ripped out the floppy drive and abandoned their device connection schemes in favor of CD-ROM and USB in 1998. In 2001 they retired the old MacOS in favor of OS X, abandoned PowerPC for Intel in 2006, and introduced the M1 in 2020. Over the span of nearly 40 years Macs have had four different CPU architectures and two unrelated operating systems.
Unlike Microsoft, Apple is willing to burn bridges to its past.
Though Apple enabled iPad apps to run on Mac since the advent of the M1 and Big Sur, most iPad developers don’t allow it. It’s as if they want to prove they’re not sheep, that the iPad and the Mac are two different devices and mixing the mobile and desktop metaphors is a bad idea.
This may be seen as a signal to Apple to keep the two software families separate, to advance iPadOS rather than break MacOS by giving it a touch-friendly, mobile interface. The M1 gives the iPad all the power it needs to host an OS as powerful as MacOS while retaining all the advantages of a the touch OS it already is.
The Price Of Power
More powerful operating systems and apps will need more memory as well as advanced processors, and that will translate to more expensive hardware. When OS and apps together start requiring M-series processors and eight gigs of memory, like the iPad Pro and Air 5, will Apple be able to continue offering the wide range of iPad hardware we enjoy today, with entry-level devices starting under $400? Or will they have to split the mobile OS again into iPadOS and iPadProOS?
Alternatively, Apple could change its mind and make the mistake Microsoft made a decade ago and develop an OS tuned for a hybrid, 2-in-1 touchscreen MacBook. Doing so would destroy the upper half of the iPad line, leaving the iPads and iPad Minis alone in that nebulous place where the iPad started off, a big iPhone whose place in the world was questioned by nearly everyone.
Surely Apple won’t do this; why make such massive changes to MacBooks and MacOS when they already have perfectly usable and popular mobile platforms?
So we circle back to the question that started all of this: why did Apple put an M1 processor in the upper-tier iPads, and what does it mean to the whole iPad line? It’s probably, at last, a harbinger of changes coming to iPadOS. Perhaps all the improvements we’ve seen since iPadOS split from iOS are just placeholders, sops thrown to the crowd to keep them quiet while bigger things happen out of sight.
Not much leaks from The Spaceship, but rumors are that iPadOS will see big changes to at least its multitasking interface. I hope for that, and much more. Until iPadOS grows up, the M1 in the iPad Pro and Air 5 seems like too big an engine in too small a airplane.
